| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: lost his head.
Oh! What a wretched thing it was. He could hardly believe that
it was he who had spoken those frenzied words; and yet he must
have spoken them, because he remembered them. He remembered that
it had taken a long time to persuade her. He had had to promise
her a ring like the one her married friend wore. Before they
entered her home she had made him take off his shoes, so that the
porter might not hear them. This had struck George particularly,
because, even flushed with excitement as he was, he had not
forgotten the warnings his father had given him as to the dangers
of contact with strange women. He had thought to himself, "This
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: my own self, and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak
better and have more to say about Homer than any other man. But I do not
speak equally well about others--tell me the reason of this.
SOCRATES: I perceive, Ion; and I will proceed to explain to you what I
imagine to be the reason of this. The gift which you possess of speaking
excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an
inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the
stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the
stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also
imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes
you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: is convinced that, somehow or other, such an one must be happy in life or
after death. In the Republic, he endeavours to show that his happiness
would be assured here in a well-ordered state. But in the actual condition
of human things the wise and good are weak and miserable; such an one is
like a man fallen among wild beasts, exposed to every sort of wrong and
obloquy.
Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led on to the conclusion, that if
'the ways of God' to man are to be 'justified,' the hopes of another life
must be included. If the question could have been put to him, whether a
man dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he suggests in the
Apology, 'death be only a long sleep,' we can hardly tell what would have
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